The Loneliness of Building a Business — and the Technology It Inspired

Annabett Wain, Founder and Director, Smart Access & Monitoring

Behind every business story there is usually another story: the human one.

It is the story of what it feels like to carry an idea before anyone else fully understands it, to make decisions without certainty, and to keep going when the responsibility sits almost entirely with you.

For many founders and business owners, that experience can be energising, purposeful and exciting. It can also be deeply lonely.

Annabett Wain, Founder and Director of Smart Access & Monitoring, knows that feeling well. Her story offers an honest insight into the emotional load of entrepreneurship, and into how lived experience can shape innovation.

This is not just a founder profile. It is a reflection on loneliness, wellbeing and responsibility — and how those experiences helped lead to the creation of a technology designed to support better decision-making as circumstances change.

It can also be the strange experience of having something occupy a huge part of your thinking while the people around you may not yet fully understand what you are trying to build.

1. The loneliness of entrepreneurship

Running a business often means carrying questions that no one else can answer for you. What if the idea does not work? What if the timing is wrong? What if the opportunity disappears? What if you are missing something obvious?

That constant mental load can be hard to explain from the outside. There may be meetings, conversations, opportunities and progress, but much of the work happens quietly: in the thinking, the second-guessing, the late-night notes, the follow-up emails and the decisions that have to be made before there is enough certainty to feel ready.

Annabett describes this as one of the biggest surprises of building SAM: the way an idea can live in your head long before it becomes something tangible to other people.

“There is not always an obvious end to the working day when the business is yours,” she says. “Sometimes your office closes. Your head does not.”

For members who run businesses, lead teams or are trying to grow something of their own, that may feel familiar. Progress can bring pressure. A promising conversation creates more work. An introduction leads to preparation. An opportunity means an application, a pitch, a follow-up and another round of decisions.

Loneliness does not always mean being physically alone. It can mean being the only person carrying a particular responsibility. It can mean appearing confident while privately navigating uncertainty, rejection, stress and exhaustion.

That matters, because wellbeing is not separate from business performance. Loneliness affects decisions. Stress affects decisions. Confidence, exhaustion and uncertainty all affect the way people lead, respond and keep going.

For Annabett, being able to talk honestly about that side of entrepreneurship is important. “If we only ever tell the polished version of entrepreneurship,” she says, “anybody struggling with the reality will assume they are doing it wrong.”

2. The lived experience behind the idea

SAM did not begin as a neat business plan. It began with lived experience, grief and a set of questions Annabett could not ignore.

In one year, Annabett lost her dad to a brain tumour, witnessed a child drown, and later lost her mum following a stroke. Three very different circumstances left her thinking deeply about how quickly situations can change, what early signs might appear, and what happens in the space between something beginning to go wrong and someone recognising that the response needs to change.

Her reflections were not about blame. They were about change: the way people can deteriorate, circumstances can shift, and information can appear gradually. A decision that was reasonable at one point may no longer be right later.

That became the question she could not stop thinking about: how do we make sure a decision that was right stays right as a situation changes?

It was a question born from painful experience, but over time it became the foundation for something practical. “Grief became guidance,” Annabett reflects. “Pain became purpose. And, if I am completely truthful, quite a lot of anger became action.”

That does not mean SAM was built from sadness. It means those experiences changed what Annabett noticed. They made her ask questions she might otherwise never have asked, and those questions gave her a reason to keep going, even when stopping would have been easier.

Like many founders, she does not describe the journey as straightforward. There have been moments of doubt, frustration, rejection and exhaustion. But once the problem became clear, walking away no longer felt like simply walking away from a business idea.

That question became the bridge between Annabett’s personal experience and the technology she went on to build. It moved the story from grief into problem-solving: if circumstances can change gradually, if warning signs can be missed, and if people are left making difficult decisions under pressure, then perhaps technology could help make those decisions more informed, more responsive and more timely.

3. Spotlight on Smart Access & Monitoring

Smart Access & Monitoring, or SAM, is the technology company that grew from those questions.

Annabett describes the problem SAM is trying to address as the gap between monitoring, alerting and decision-making. Many systems are effective at detecting events and raising alerts. But before an alarm, small changes may already be appearing. After an alarm, someone still has to decide what to do next.

SAM is being developed around the idea that decisions need to be reviewed as circumstances evolve. The focus is not simply on whether something has happened, but on whether the response still makes sense as new information emerges.

The company is still on its journey. Annabett is working on validation, intellectual property, research conversations and exploring where the technology could be useful. The University of Lincoln has become part of that journey, with research and validation opportunities being explored around the work.

That middle stage of building a business is often overlooked. It is not the polished story told after everything has worked. It is the uncertain part: when the idea has moved beyond a thought, but there is still evidence to build, people to involve, and a great deal to prove.

For members, Annabett’s story is a reminder that innovation rarely arrives fully formed. It is often shaped by lived experience, difficult questions, persistence and the willingness to keep learning in public.

It is also a reminder that the wellbeing of the person building the business matters. Businesses are not built by ideas alone. They are built by people carrying responsibility, uncertainty and hope — often all at the same time.

Annabett is clear that SAM is not about rewriting the past. “I cannot change what happened to the people I loved,” she says. “But those experiences made me ask questions: could we notice change earlier? Could we make better use of information that is already there? Could we help people make better decisions at the moments when those decisions matter most?”

Those questions are still guiding the next steps for SAM — and they are also what make this more than a technology story. It is a story about why lived experience matters, why founder wellbeing matters, and why the support around business owners can shape what they are able to build.